


still hearing phantom waves

by thisstableground



Series: DNH No Crossover [4]
Category: Do No Harm (TV)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Aftermath of Violence, Gen, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-20
Updated: 2019-07-15
Packaged: 2020-05-15 09:52:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 14,932
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19293319
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thisstableground/pseuds/thisstableground
Summary: A compilation of one-shots about Ruben, his family, and his recovery that are too short to warrant separate posts.





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [it makes more sense to have these be in their own thing so they can be standalone if you don't wanna read the crossover. but they're all also part of 90verse continuity. also functions as a semi-sequel to maps - everything in the first chapter about what ian did to ruben applies here, but it doesn't follow any of the things in subsequent chapters.
> 
> there's a blanket content warning for this whole compilation that a lot of it deals with the very messy early stages of ruben coming home, so a lot of PTSD related content and sometimes talk of suicidal thoughts. nothing in-depth about the actual events of jamaica, but i'll warn if there ever is. this specific chapter also has some discussion of disordered eating.]
> 
> [this chapter for the prompt of ruben making breakfast.]

Ruben had always been under the impression that near death experiences were supposed to come with new appreciation of the life you almost lost. He had a whole run of them and only came away with a blurred recollection of what now feels like someone else’s rescue: he doesn’t remember having to be sedated for the plane back, or arriving at a Philadelphia hospital that thankfully wasn’t Independence Memorial. He doesn’t remember seeing his family again for the first time in months. The earliest thing he can recall from his return is that Ma was the one who was there to stop him when he tried to tear out his own IV and make a break for it.

“The doctor said you have to stay here for just a little while, sweetheart,” she’d explained, as he begged her to let him leave. “You’ve lost too much weight, and you have a fever. They want to make sure you’re going to be okay before you come back home.”

He remembers thinking,  _I’m never going to be okay_. But they treated him for dehydration, fed him gritty-textured nutrition shakes and hospital food he had no appetite for till he started to put on weight again, gave him antibiotics for the infection from poorly-cared for wounds that had hit him with the fever, and after a few weeks they let him go back to live with his ma.

Near death hasn’t gifted him with a new lease on life so far. At best he’s been having life pushed on him while he passively lets it happen. When he wakes up hours before everyone else, he lies there with the day a vast, black expanse of vacuum and inside himself the same expanse, and wants to go back to sleep forever. Ma is the one who makes him get up, knocks on his locked door in the morning and tells him that she’s made breakfast so he needs to come downstairs and eat before she leaves. She does’t believe him when he says he eats while she’s at work, which is fair. He didn’t at first. Hunger has just been the background noise of consciousness for a long enough time he forgot what it meant.

From those early dayshe remembers her trying to grasp his thin wrist gently in one hand, and how she looked when he shied away from her touch, and her voice tearfully saying, “look at yourself, cariño, there’s almost nothing left of you”.  He remembers thinking,  _good._ If there’s nothing left of him then there’s nothing anyone can take from him. If he’s nothing but hollow no matter what, then what could hungry even mean any more?

But he’d eat, only because it was easier than lying to Ma about it, and because it was easier than making her cry again. And life pushed on him pushes him to live: he goes to therapy. He exists. He wakes up in the morning, every morning, even though there’s nothing to wake up to when the trial in April is over, the  _now what_ of May and June.

In July he wakes up, and thinks about lying here all day, and thinks about the gnawing feeling of unfilled space echoing around his body, and thinks,  _I want arroz con leche._

What? Jesus. When was the last time he wanted  _anything_?

Breakfast sounds…good, though. Good enough that it seems too long to wait for Ma to get up in an hour. Even though he’s got nothing but time it’s somehow a lot harder to let the minutes slip by when there’s actually something he could  _do_  about what he wants, so after fidgeting around restlessly for a while he gives into it and unlocks his door. Crouches at the top of the stairs to peek through the railings into the living room below, like he used to in their first house in Philadelphia when he was eavesdropping on Ma having whispered disagreements with his father about Ruben when they thought that he was sleeping.

Nobody in the living room, or in the dining room when he tiptoes down there. He leans around the doorway of the kitchen, nobody in there. Ground floor cleared for safety he can relax some, putting the rice and cinnamon sticks on to boil and opening a can of condensed milk to add later. As he’s taking a bowl out of the cupboard, he realises that when he woke up feeling empty his first thought was  _that’s probably because I’m hungry_ not  _that’s because I wish I was dead._ He drops the bowl on the counter in shock: it clatters loudly but doesn’t break.

“Shit!” he curses, gripping the edge of the bowl tightly and trying not to let the sound fling him into fight-or-flight, and then repeats “shit,” when he hears the sound of a door opening on the floor above and then footsteps down the stairs. Ma’s room is above the kitchen. She must have heard him.

“It’s only me, Ma,” he calls softly.

“Rubén?” She comes to the kitchen. “¿Estás bien?”

“Sí, just dropped a bowl.”

“You’re up very early,” she says. Ruben’s pretty sure she means,  _you’re up at all?_

“I’m making arroz con leche. You can go back to bed, it’s okay.”

“Do you need any help?”

“I got it.” Don’t be irritated. It’s a reasonable question. Still, he’s glad that she leaves the room instead of watching him, though he pauses to hear her footsteps and can tell she hasn’t gone back upstairs. She’s probably listening out for him from the living room. Don’t be irritated at that, either.

The rice simmers gently releasing cinnamon-scented steam and Ruben dips a finger into the can of condensed milk to taste it while he waits. Arroz con leche reminds him of sick days off school: insisting he needed to go in to stay on top of his work, but secretly relieved when Ma refused because it meant being able to stay in the quiet, just him and the one person he could always rely on, the way he’d always preferred things to be. She’d cook the rice while he went upstairs to bring his quilt and a pillow down to the sofa and then when he was tucked in comfortably she’d bring him a bowlful, that comforting mixture of warm and spiced and sweet but still bland enough to be easy to eat when he had no appetite. He’d feed spoonfuls from his own bowl to Paola and Mercedes when they were babies too, his way of letting them know  _sick days used to be for just me and Mamá, but it’s okay that you’re here now too._

When it’s ready he dishes out two bowls, puts raisins on Ma’s but not his own. Makes two coffees, both black with cinnamon, and takes one bowl and one mug on a tray into the living room. Ma is sitting on the sofa in her bathrobe, absent-mindedly pencilling answers into the newspaper crossword.

“Desayuno,” he says, putting the tray down on the coffee table.

“Oh, gracias,” she says, putting a hand over her heart. “What a nice surprise.”

It shouldn’t be a surprise for him to do something so simple as this for her, he thinks. He stands for a minute watching as she sets her newspaper down and picks up the tray. When he was growing up she always used to watch the news in the morning but they don’t do that any more after half the local news was him for so long. Ruben might be old news now but they still don’t watch it: there’s enough sadness in their lives without having to learn the sadness of the rest of the world too. What does she do to fill the time before work instead? Does she do the crossword every day? Does she sit in the stillness of the early hours listening out for him and the girls, trying to anticipate what kind of morning they might have? Psyching herself up to pull him out of his room to come eat, dreading how difficult he’ll make it for her today, and all while she’s got her actual job to go to afterwards. Does she think about him staying home from school when he was little too, and wonder like he does if he’ll be here in a second childhood forever, long after the girls grow up, just Ruben and her and long, quiet, empty days?

She didn’t sign up for this. She must think it, but she never says it to his face, never lets it show. He leans in to give her a tentative kiss on the cheek, and says, “I love you, Mamá.” It comes out a little pitiful.

“I love you too, cariño,” she says, patting his wrist. “Don’t forget to eat your own breakfast, now.”

In the kitchen, he covers the rest of the rice over so that the girls can have it when they wake up, and contemplates going to eat next to Ma on the couch or maybe the dining room, but instead end up sitting on the kitchen counter by the window because that’s the best spot at this time of day. The sun’s just coming up, spilling in clear and luminant across the windowsill. He’s always said Ma has a perfect spot to grow herbs there, but she’s never got round to doing it. Maybe he’ll do it for her one day, when he’s more certain of his ability to take care of something consistently. Maybe one day he’ll even have a place of his own again, a nice bright little kitchen full of herbs, drinking coffee and—no, that’s too much to think about for now. For now, he’s having breakfast on the counter in the growing sunlight by the window in his mother’s kitchen, and that has to be enough. Alive enough to remember that he can do nice things for other people, alive enough to remind his family that he loves them. He remembered how to feel that, if nothing else. He remembered how to make arroz con leche like Ma used to and that cinnamon and sweet and warm are all things that he can still feel good about. He isn’t ready to be happy that he’s alive yet. But at this particular moment, he’s glad he isn’t dead. That will have to be enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> come talk ruben to me on [ tumblr!](https://thisstableground.tumblr.com)


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [for the prompt: who did ruben encounter on his final visit to imh? what was it like?]

It takes some time to get round to it what with the million other priorities he had like not dying or losing his mind when he first came back home, but at some point in October, Ruben logs back in to his Facebook account. He’d had internet access from a little cafe in Jamaica, but rarely used it for anything personal, irrationally terrified that somehow Ian would find out.  _You’re gonna be dead to everyone but me. Make sure it stays that way. Your mom is a great cook, did I ever tell you that? And such a nice house._

There are a lot of messages, for saying he’s never really used his Facebook much anyway. A lot of posts on his wall. A lot of _we were so glad to hear about you coming back_ and  _it would be great to see you again sometime_ and  _call us if you need anything._

He’s only skim-reading the posts on his wall when suddenly he hits March and the messages change from welcome backs to  _rest in peace_ and  _prayers are with the family_ and  _may they find comfort knowing he’s in a better place._

 _“_ What, you mean Jamaica?” he mutters to himself, bitterly. “Yeah, some dream vacation that turned out to be.”

Ruben’s a raised Catholic turned atheist, so he’s not unused to prayers being sent his way and appreciates the sentiment if not the action when it’s from family, when it’s from people who he sees regularly. Not people who he hasn’t spoken to since college, since high school. They don’t really want to met up with him, they don’t really want him to call and ask for anything. It’s just what you’re supposed to say and he hates it.

Does it make them feel better to have someone to look at and say  _at least I’m not him,_ or is it just that they can’t stand the idea of anyone going through something without shoving themselves in so they can be part of it? Where were all these people who apparently give so much of a shit about him before all this?

He’s reading through February now, watching the things that happened in reverse: there’s less posts than in March, but still prayers, still thoughts:  _hope they find you, hope you come home soon, hope you’re safe._

Two out of three ain’t bad.

If he scrolls back any further he’s going to reach a point before it happened. He’s going to suddenly find just a normal tagged photo with his sisters, or an article that one of his cousins linked him to. Life is laid out so clearly in this format.

If he checks his friend list he might even still have Jason Cole listed there.

Without checking, without even considering whether it’ll worry anyone when he drops off the grid or whether there’s anything worth saving first, Ruben clicks as fast as possible through to delete his account, and like something possesses his hands he doesn’t stop there. His academic research accounts and his barely-used-anyway Twitter and his old email addresses, any trace of himself that he has any control over is wiped away before he has time to think. He doesn’t want to be contacted, he doesn’t want a timeline of the steps that led him here.  Get rid of everything. Start again new.

When he’s finally sure he’s got it all he sits there breathless like he’s been running. His hands are sweaty but he feels good, he feels better than he has for months. He feels  _free._

Or, he nearly does. There’s one more thing.

***

As arranged a week ago, Dr Young meets Ruben at the hospital entrance. He doesn’t have any of his security passes any more, can’t just wander through on a whim.

“Good morning, Dr Marcado,” she says, tone inscrutable.

“Dr Young,” he replies. “How’s it going?”

“Busy as always,” she answers briskly. “Let me take you to the lab.”

She doesn’t ask how he is or what he’s been up to. The unspoken part of their settlement: don’t drag our name through the mud and we’ll return the favor, nothing to see here, nothing to talk about. He doesn’t know how she feels about any of it, if she even feels about it at all.

Nothing to talk about so they don’t talk. Hospital is loud, he’d forgotten how loud, beeps and yelling and murmuring. Loud in all his senses, bright artificial light, antiseptic smell kicks off too many sense memories. Thinks of a needle painful and unskilled missing the vein and bruising deeply. Thinks of a needle careful and practiced putting in his stitches. His arms hurt. It all hurts _._  His arms itch but he can’t touch them, increases risk of infection in new cuts - no, no, they’re old now, but still the risk of drawing attention. Automatically he goes to tuck his hands into the pockets of his labcoat and hits empty air.

They’re outside the door to his old lab. Ruben doesn’t remember a second of the walk here.

“I’m afraid I can’t stay, I have a lot of work to do,” Dr Young says, holding her pass up to the sensor on the door till the light flickers green and she pushes it ajar. “Someone from the lab will show you out when you’re ready, I’ve informed them all you’ll be visiting.”

“Thankyou,” he says, and she nods at him as she leaves. He takes a second to steel himself before going in, holding the door only just cracked open, when Dr Young calls out “Dr Marcado?” from several paces behind him.

She hesitates when he turns to look at her. Ruben’s pretty sure he’s never seen Dr Young hesitate before. “…You’re looking very well.”

That’s probably the closest he’ll ever get to an apology. It’ll do.

***

Ruben used to be able to walk in here and know everything that was happening in every corner. Could sit in his window-lined office looking out and be able to pinpoint who just had an epiphany and who just fucked up and who just realised that it had been at least an hour since they had coffee.

Ruben likes familiar and there’s none of that to be found here any more. Nothing in the way they ask him questions, carefully treading round the elephant in the room, sentences full of meaningful ellipses and italics: “how…have you  _been_?”, “are you… _alright_?”

Questions even Ruben can’t miss the unspoken cues on: we’re not telling you to talk about the thing, but if you do wanna talk about the thing we’re all dying to know more.

Nothing in the people themselves. Ruben tried his best when he worked here to keep whatever details about them he could straight. He likes being liked, and people like it when you care about their personal lives. Now he can’t remember if Jim was the one with the kid going to college, can’t remember if it was Jenny or Alice who got engaged at the start of the year.

Dave has been promoted to Ruben’s old office. He can keep it. Ruben carefully makes sure to look in any direction except for that wall of windows the whole time he’s here.

There’s a few new faces too, casually finding reasons to walk in within hearing distance of Ruben catching up with his old coworkers. He pauses under the observation.

“Don’t mind the nosy newbies,” Dave says pointedly, and on cue the techs scatter back to their work. “They’ve just heard a lot about you.”

“Yeah, I bet,” Ruben mutters.

“Shit, no, I didn’t mean, uh. That wasn’t…I just meant because of how much you did around here, nobody knows their way around a lab like you, haha,” Dave backtracks, looking uncomfortable enough that Alice butts in.

“It’d be great to know what you think about a couple things we’ve been working on since you, ah, left,” she says brightly.

“I’m kind of out of practice with this stuff,” Ruben answers.

“Oh, I’m not asking you to solve it in an afternoon! But we’d sure appreciate any insights you got.”

This place takes all the fight out of him. He wants to say no and instead says “what’s the deal, then?”

Nothing familiar in the lab. Ruben isn’t part of the machine any more, he doesn’t know his way around. They talk about the results of projects he’d abandoned half-finished, of how they’ve progressed while he was gone. The world still turned without him. He just about understands what he’s being told, but the pauses where he’s supposed to interject and doesn’t are painfully obvious to everyone.

Is it scarier to think that they need something he’ll never be able to provide again, or to think that maybe they never needed him at all?

“So what do you think we should do?” Alice asks. Ruben hasn’t even been listening for the past few minutes.

The brain is physically altered by trauma, a mantra often repeated to himself. In the first few months he couldn’t think clear enough to even do math, now he can at least keep up with what they’re telling him, and this shit is far beyond high school level. That’s an improvement.

But it’s like straining to hear something just out of earshot, instinct telling him that if they’d asked about any of this stuff a year ago he’d have got it figured out within minutes. The harder he tries to grasp at it the further away it gets until he has to admit “I don’t know.”

“Oh,” says Alice, trying to cover her surprise. “Well, that’s fine, we’ve been working on it for weeks ourselves and still got nothing, wouldn’t expect you to have an answer after five minutes.”

That  _is_  what everyone had expected, though, isn’t it? Ruben’s supposed to always have the answer. Ruben isn’t supposed to be a disappointment, not here. Everywhere else, sure, but not here. He did impossible things here once.

“I should know this,” Ruben says, frustrated. He clenches his fists, nails digging into palms.

“You’re out of practice, like you said,” Dave says, looking at him with concern. “It’s really okay.”

“It’s not okay,” Ruben says, too loudly. A few heads turn to him, then quickly look away again. “It’s not okay at all, I should  _know_  this.”

“Hey—“ Dave takes a step towards him, Ruben shoots backwards until his back hits the table behind him.

“No,” he says. “Stay away from me.”

Here’s the closure he needed though it hurts when it hits: Ruben is nothing in this room. It’s Ruben, not Dr Marcado, who did all the work just to be able to walk through those doors this morning and nobody here will be able to see that. They’ll always just see Dr Marcado who can’t do the one thing he’s good for any more. Dr Marcado who fucked up more spectacularly than anyone could possibly imagine.

“Don’t touch me,” he says quietly even though nobody is trying to. In this building, it’s all he’s got left. “Don’t touch me, don’t touch me, don’t—“

“Ruben,” a soft, sweet voice says from somewhere near the door. “Do you want to go and get a coffee with me?”

It’s Connie. Oh, thank god. They might never have been close but she’s safe presence. She was always kind to him, could have been a friend if Ruben knew how to be that to anyone. More importantly right now, she’s an escape route.

“Please,” he says, desperately, and forgets to even say goodbye to everyone else in his rush to get away.

“You looked like you needed rescuing,” Connie says as they walk down the corridor together.

Ruben nods with a forced smile, head down so he doesn’t have to see any of the staff double-take when they recognise him as he passes. Might be better to just head home, but there’s still the tiniest bit of defiance left: closure comes on Ruben’s terms, not Ian’s, not Jason’s. When he leaves Independence Memorial for the last time, he wants to walk away from it, not run scared.

If that’s even an option. In the hospital cafeteria the coffee machine grinds and hisses, there’s trays clattering and voices everywhere, and Ruben feels like he’s standing inside an avalanche. He keeps thinking he hears Jason, faint under the cacophony. He checks behind himself, once then twice then every few seconds. He keeps thinking he hears someone say his name.

“You drink lattes, right?” Connie asks. “…Ruben, did you hear me?”

“Huh? Uh, yeah, whatever is fine.”

“Maybe we should take these outside,” she says. “Two lattes and we’ll have them to go, thanks.”

***

Safely on a bench in the parking lot, Ruben carefully takes the lid off his paper cup to blow over his drink, condensation of his breath mingling with the steam. His senses are winding down in the cold air and the comparative quiet. Connie looks off over the parking lot, squinting into the fall sun.

“I nearly went to work somewhere else afterwards,” she says in a distant sort of voice. “Once Dr Cole was arrested and it all came out, I thought about getting a new job.”

“Yeah?” he says. Looks like they’re actually gonna talk about it. A relief in it’s own way. Avoidance is a cognitive dissonance that makes him existentially uncomfortable: the way sometimes you stay mad at someone after dreaming that you fought with them, maybe everything he’s feeling is an emotional response to something that never actually happened. Even with the undeniable evidence, sometimes Ruben doubts his reality. External confirmation helps.

“It changed things for everyone in the lab, you know? You never imagine something like this happening where you— but hey, I guess I don’t need to tell  _you_  that.”

“Guess not.”

He’s too tired to struggle through finding anything else to say. There’s a spell of silence until Connie says “I get lunch with Josh a lot now.”

That gets Ruben’s attention. “Really? I didn’t know you two even knew each other.”

“The police came round asking everyone questions and nobody would tell us anything except that you were missing,” Connie says. “I figured Josh might have some more information. He’s the one who found out Dr Cole was on your plane, did you know?”

“Yeah, I heard.”

“And we just carried on hanging out after that,” she says. “He’ll be sorry to have missed you today.”

“Doubt it,” Ruben says. “Huh. I never imagined Josh to be the type of person tohang outwith anyone, to be honest.”

“He’s uptight but we get on pretty well. And I guess we both felt responsible for what happened to you. Nobody else really knew how that felt.”

Ruben frowns, baffled. “How could you possibly be responsible for it?”

“Josh says he’d thought there was something strange about you and Dr Cole for ages,” Connie says. “I’ve tried telling him everyone knew that, we just thought it was harmless, but he’s kinda stubborn. And I saw Dr Cole hurting you and told Dr Young everything because I thought…I thought maybe he’d been hurting you for a while. I knew there was something wrong that night you told me not to tell him I’d seen you and took all those days off work, you never stay away from the lab that long. I thought maybe you didn’t know how to get out of whatever it was by yourself.”

Ruben sighs. “Well, you weren’t wrong.”

“I didn’t do it to get you in trouble, I swear,” she says, tearfully. “I couldn’t just ignore what he’d done and it ended up making everything so much worse but they weren’t supposed to suspend you. They were supposed to  _help_  you.”

“I don’t blame you for it, Connie,” he says. “I don’t blame anyone except him and myself.”

That might be a lie, Ruben isn’t sure. No need to make her feel worse by saying it out loud. Connie gives a sad little shrug and doesn’t say anything. She’s not usually this sombre.

He takes a sip of his drink and makes a face. Even milk can’t hide the burnt flavor. “Ugh,  _god_ , I forgot how terrible the coffee is here.”

“Is it weird? Being back here again.”

Ruben nods. “Everything —“ he starts, and his voice catches. He clears his throat. “Everything reminds me of him.”

“You’re not coming back to work, are you?”

“No,” Ruben says, feels the lightness of freedom even through the heavy anxiety of the day. He’s been anchored down here too long.

“I’m gonna miss having you around,” she says. It’s the kind of thing people are always saying. Connie’s about the only one here Ruben might believe it from. “Where will you go next?”

“I don’t know. Not another lab, not yet. Somewhere out of state, I think. And I probably wont tell anyone here where it is.”

“Then I hope you find somewhere that makes you happier than this place did,” Connie says, and finally smiles at him. “And with better coffee.”

“We’ll see,” Ruben says.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [for the prompt: ruben gets a blue version of lin's grey sweater]

It’s March, and Ruben doesn’t dress for springtime. That said, he also isn’t going to wear any of his old sweaters from Before, even though his ma kept his favorite ones when she was sorting through his apartment after the funeral.

If you’d asked him in January how he thought this year was going to go, it probably wouldn’t have included his own funeral. It  _definitely_ wouldn’t have included him thinking about his own funeral two weeks after the event actually took place.

The idea of anyone, even if it’s only Ma, going through everything he owns makes him nauseous. Nobody sets up their living space under the assumption that someone’s going to walk in and see every last inch of it some day. He’s sick of people being in his possessions, in his private spaces, in his personal space. It makes him feel unclean, someone else’s fingerprints over things he never said they could touch.

The idea of Ma knowing him so well that she knew exactly what things to save makes him cry himself to sleep more than once, deafened by a confused babble of grief for himself and for her and for everything. He sometimes sits and just looks in the drawer that he’s put all his Before-clothes in, but he never takes them out.

She saved these because they were important even though she thought he’d never be able to wear them again, and she wasn’t wrong, even though he survived. Those sweaters don’t belong to whoever he is right now. He’s afraid of what they’ll look like on him, afraid that they’ll only reconfirm what he knows to be true: Ruben is dead. Ruben is gone. Ruben fits wrong in his old clothes like he fits wrong in his new skin.

***

It’s April, and Ruben doesn’t wear plaid any more.

Two white concentric, five white vertical, one green concentric, four green vertical, one pink concentric, three pink vertical. One white button. Cuff of his shirt. The flight to Jamaica was three and a half hours, Ian stopped talking to him after five minutes. Ruben counted the line patterns on the cuff of his sleeve over and over, anything to keep himself from imagining what might happen once they landed.

He could have done a thousand things different on that plane if he’d been thinking clearly, if he’d not been awake for almost three days at that point, if he was less delirious with fear and fatigue. Too late now. All he has is the memory of navy plaid with white green pink stripes and a lifetime of regrets. The shirt itself was lost to the fire Ian set like a sacrifice, burning the only things Ruben owned in Jamaica, and now Ruben’s been back in America for a month and he doesn’t ever wear plaid.

***

It’s May and Ruben’s mom buys all his clothes for him now, says he can’t keep wearing someone else’s hand-me-downs forever.

He’s been draped in charity fabrics since February, things given to him from people at the hotel he’d lived in while he was in Jamaica. When he told them he was going back home he had tried to return it all, Cleo’s maternity sweaters and Marcus’ patterned shirts and so many things that were the last traces of Mrs Campbell’s late husband, saved in memoriam the same way Ruben’s mother saved his own things. They’d all insisted he keep everything they gave him. The first things he’d owned in the first days of his new life, the selflessness behind the gifting probably the only comfort that helped him hold onto the last frayed pieces of his unravelled self, Ruben existing only in the stitches and threads of donated clothing and donated medical assistance.

Now the trial’s in full swing, he wonders every day if he should’ve stayed away, in the place where he’d spent two months grasping desperately for life and for a living and for breath, the air tasting of salt like the sea like tears, where people were kind and didn’t ever ask questions and didn’t ever sit him in front of a jury and cross-examine him to so they can decide whether his pain is a justified penance for all his mistakes.

His mom buys him an outfit to wear to court. The blazer hangs wrong on his shoulders because he doesn’t know what size he is any more and because he’s hunching over, never quite small enough to disappear but trying like hell anyway. He feels like a Medusa, some fearful lonely creature that shouldn’t be looked on by human eyes because something catastrophic is bound to come of it, and there’s so many eyes on him while he walks up the courtroom steps, while he takes the stand, while they take a recess because he starts weeping too hard to answer any questions. He feels like a corpse at a funeral home, dressed up and made up to be as lifelike and formal as possible but the dead will always look dead, he’s still decaying from the inside out, nobody’s fooled.

Jason sits up straight in the stand, and his suit fits him perfectly.

Ruben changes immediately back into sweatpants and a hoodie when they get home every time, pulls the hood so far over his head that he can’t see past it. His ma knocks on the bedroom door after the final decision is made and asks if he wants to talk about it. He doesn’t want to talk at all. His ma lays out clean jeans and shirts on the chair in his room every night and he ignores them, wears the same pair of sweatpants and the same hoodie every day for nearly two weeks, at home and to therapy too because who gives a shit whether his therapist thinks he’s gross. No matter what lie he dresses up in, they’d both know he’s broken and disgusting and defiled underneath anyway.

Eventually, Ma buys him three more pairs of sweatpants so at least he’ll be wearing clean ones. They’re all identical to the first pair, grey and soft and badly-fitting. Every time he has to hitch them up and re-tighten the drawstring around his wasted body he wonders if she’s trying to make some kind of point by always buying his old size, like he doesn’t already know he’s less than he used to be without her constantly reminding him. Ma tries to feed him back to health even though he’s never hungry and he shouts sometimes and sometimes refuses to eat and at one point throws the plate across the room, because why not act like a toddler now that he can’t even dress himself like an adult any more.

***

It’s June and none of his choices can be unconscious when every day Ruben’s consciously having to choose to just stay alive. That alone takes so much of his energy that even the tiniest of crossroads feel huge, things he’d usually autopilot through: what does he want for dinner, does he want to watch tv or read or sleep, should he sit in the living room or his bedroom or try to sit in the yard?

He doesn’t know, he doesn’t know  _anything_. There were so many bad choices in his past which seemed so small at the time that now nothing ever feels small, everything seems to be an integral part of the foundation he’s struggling to build, so that if he makes the wrong decision now it might all fall back down later. What does he want to wear? Is he still the kind of guy who wears soft blue crew-neck sweaters? Is he even allowed to still be that person, does he  _want_  to be, who is Ruben going to be from this point forward?

He doesn’t know. Ma doesn’t lay out outfits on his chair any more. Ruben hasn’t dared ask her if it’s because she’s trying to let him choose on his own or if it’s just that she’s given up on him.

Sometimes he tries to pick clothes out for himself, tells himself he’s not going anywhere anyway so it doesn’t matter what he ends up with, he just needs to learn how to make decisions again. Every time it ends with most of his wardrobe strewn on the floor around him while he hyperventilates, every time he ends up back in grey sweatpants, grey hoodie.

***

It’s July, it’s time for another day of therapy, and Ruben begrudgingly admits it might finally be helping.

The thing that makes him aware of this is kinda stupid: he’s sitting down to put his sneakers on when he notices there’s a coffee stain on the thigh of his sweatpants, a little circle where he’d clearly been resting a mug. And once he sees that he also sees his hoodie has had better days, the cuffs smudged with miscellaneous dust and smelling like he slept in it, probably because he did. It wouldn’t be the worst state his therapist has seen him in: he’s showed up there in clothes he’s been wearing for a week straight, unshaven and unshowered and not even bothering with deodorant because, as he’s been saying for months, who gives a shit. But suddenly he  _does_. He can’t go outside like this. It’s embarrassing.

Embarrassed is something he hasn’t had the energy to be in quite a while. Can’t say it was the first thing he wanted to get back from when he was normal, but he missed it in a weird way.

“Give me a minute,” he says to Ma, who is already waiting by the door with her keys in hand. “I need to get changed.”

It shouldn’t take long. It’s not like anything in his wardrobe is anything other than plain and generic anyway and it doesn’t matter and he’s going to be late and he can’t choose, he can’t choose, there’s too many things and he doesn’t want to fuck it up and he’s already fucking it up by making it into a big deal when it doesn’t  _matter_.

“Rubén, we really have to get going.”

He doesn’t answer.

“Are you okay in there? Cariño? I’m coming in.”

Ma finds him standing in front of the closet crying, and she just sighs.

Gently moving him aside, she selects two pairs of jeans and two sweaters, all in nondescript shades of navy, and says “That narrows it down, just pick one of each.”

“But I don’t know which one I’m supposed to pick,” he says desperately.

“This isn’t a test, Rubén,” she tells him. “Nothing will change just because you choose one pair of jeans over the other.”

“But—“

“Butting is for goats,” she says. “How about this: I’ll count down from five and at the end, just point at anything. Don’t think too hard about it. There isn’t a wrong answer.”

There’s always a wrong answer, he wants to say, but before he can she says  _five, four—_

He tries his best, he really does. Still ends up twenty minutes late for therapy, changing his mind as soon as they shut the front door and trying to run back inside, freaking out in the car on the way over because he realizes he should’ve worn the other jeans, they’re slightly softer and these ones don’t fit right at all and he fucked up, he can’t even make this decision without fucking up, he can’t do anything right — but at least they get there eventually, and Ruben’s wearing pants, so it could’ve gone worse even though he is outright sobbing as he walks through the main entrance.

When he tells his therapist that he’s so late because he chose the outfit by himself (well, sort of by himself) she claps with genuine delight, beaming. She doesn’t even mention the fact that he’s still got tears running down his face, which is nice of her.

At the end of the session she asks how he’d feel about reducing his sessions from three times a week to only twice, so that he can start trying to cope independently. It takes him a full week to be able to decide that he’s willing to try it out.

***

It’s August and Ruben for the first time in a long time doesn’t force his mind detached from his body while he showers, and that means that for the first time he’s present enough to realize that his ribs aren’t showing through his skin any more. For the first time in a long time, after he showers he takes the spare towel he always hangs over the mirror off so he can look at himself naked, he can press his hands against his belly and draw phantom lines down where his hipbones were until recently too sharp without the extra layer of padding that’s always been there, coming back again now. He’s still smaller than he used to be, he’s still nothing anyone would enjoy looking at, but he feels substantial again, he feels corporeal.

For the first time since getting back home Ruben doesn’t get dressed in the bathroom, goes to his bedroom with just a towel wrapped around his waist. He doesn’t walk, he runs like he used to when he was a kid and had to turn the light out and then go back through the dark hallway to his room. Thudding footsteps and bedroom door slamming behind him so that whatever terrors of overimagination lurk in quiet suburban houses at night didn’t have time to catch him before he was safely back in bed.  Everyone knows that monsters can’t catch you when you’re underneath a quilt, as long as your feet are covered and your eyes are closed. Everyone knows the thrill of risking and running and winning one more night and okay, Ruben’s an adult and totally aware he’s not actually running away from monsters. Nobody’s even home who might’ve seen him, but he sits down on his bed and his heart beats an excited scared-safe-scared-safe pace like a victory march anyway.

***

It’s September, and Ruben’s started walking from the bathroom to his room in just a towel every time he showers. A personal challenge to himself that he accepts means it’s inevitable that eventually someone’s gonna bump into him, and it ends up being Paola.

Neither of them say anything, freezing for a long five seconds before Ruben runs to his room. This time he really does hide under the quilt with his eyes tightly closed until he calms down again enough to put some clothes on and rationalize with himself. Obviously he’d known it was a risk. That’s the  _point_ of challenging himself, and it’s not like she wasn’t aware. Paola’s been here through everything in the past seven months. Paola was there for the trial, where there were pictures. But that was Ruben disembodied, closeups of his arms and chest and back without his face visible. Damage without the humanity. Now it’s undeniably his, in their home, and actually having someone see is very different to photographs. Seeing it in person is probably very different to photographs too.

She comes to his room later, after he thought she was already asleep. Her hair is in two braids either side of her head and she’s wearing leggings and an old t-shirt. It’s so faded that the picture’s barely visible but Ruben knows it’s touristy-as-hell New York City skyline, barely a step away from an I <3 NY shirt. It used to be his way back when he was a teenager, a gift from Abuela down in Rochester when she first moved over from Vega Alta.

Paola doesn’t say anything about what happened earlier. She just holds out a book, as faded and familiar as the shirt: it’s the copy of The Hobbit that belongs to his mother, that she’s had since long before Ruben was born. Ma used to read it to Ruben, and Ruben read it to the girls when he used to babysit them.

“Read to me?” she asks.

Wordless, he lifts the side of his quilt so she can get in and make herself comfortable next to him while he takes the book, flips the yellowing pages against his finger.

“Do the voices too,” she says.

“Are you implying I ever  _wouldn’t_  do the voices? I’m offended.”

He reads to her until she falls asleep with her head on his shoulder like she’s still a baby instead of an eighteen year old - an adult, he suddenly realises, which makes him sad and proud and frightened and altogether too many different things to be feeling when it’s gone eleven PM. It doesn’t matter right now. Now she’s just his little sister fallen asleep against his side in his old hand-me-down clothes, and Ruben is wearing his pajamas too: a long-sleeved dark blue t-shirt, and his pajama pants are plaid.

***

It’s October and one day without even thinking Ruben puts his old mottled blue sweater on, the one that always used to be his favorite. He does a mental double-take when he realizes that even though he knows the last time he wore it was to that godawful night at the rave, it’s not really  _Reminding_  him of it with a capital R.

Actually it just reminds him of…himself. Ruben still doesn’t know what that means. But he wants it to mean  _something_ , and something more than just sleeping and surviving and therapy. He wants to mean something more than healing.

The cooling fall weather is a relief. Layers on layers on layers. He’s been trying to get out more recently, and today he’s wearing his old blue sweater, which he covers with a scarf and a jacket and he leaves a note for his ma to tell her he’s visiting IMH again one last time. He’s already outside before he starts second-guessing it, and what’s all that decision-making practice worth if he can’t start applying it to bigger things? Stick to the course. It’s only a goodbye.

Ma hugs him carefully when he gets home, tells him that he’s very brave. Ruben says he wants to be alone for a while, sits down at his desk in his old blue sweater and searches the internet for teaching jobs, anything anywhere outside of Philadelphia.

***

It’s November and Ruben is in the same blazer and tie he wore on the day Jason finally got his bullshit lightweight sentence in court. This time he’s trying to sit up with proper posture, laptop in front of him, Skype window open. It’s actually kinda better this way than in person: nobody can see his legs trembling under the desk. He prays for better results than the last time he wore this outfit, which is hardly what he needs to be thinking about right now. Maybe he should’ve worn something else, but he doesn’t own a lot of business casual any more.

He doesn’t expect to make the cut. He’d been totally honest in the first interview, which is always a terrible idea in interviews even at the best of times. It’s just he’s not good at lying and of course they want to know why the sudden change in career and they’re gonna do a background check anyway, so it was easier to just be honest and say yeah, if you hire me for this position there’s gonna be some  _deeply_ unusual baggage.

Professor Daniel “call me Dan” Wicks, the man with Ruben’s future new career in his hands, had raised his eyebrows and hummed and said “that sounds like it’s gonna be some homework for me then. Give me a week, I’ll be in touch with our decision.”

A week and five days later, Professor Wicks sets up a second Skype appointment with him and skips the small talk for: “so, it took a little longer than I expected because I had to talk with ha,  _quite_  a few people. We’ve reviewed the, uh, circumstances you mentioned during our first conversation.”

Ruben braces for disappointment.

“I understand that this is a very unique situation,” Dan continues. “I’ve gotta be honest with you, Dr Marcado, it is not something I was particularly expecting to deal with.”

“You and me both,” Ruben says dryly.

“So before we talk about your start date, I wanted to discuss whether you might already have some thoughts about what measures we’d need to put in place to ensure the wellbeing of yourself and the students.”

“Wait,” Ruben says. “Rewind, wait, I  _got_  the job? You’re  _hiring_  me?”

“We’re hiring you,” Dan confirms, and his serious interview face turns into a grin. “Dude, we’ve seen your credentials, you think we’re gonna let someone like you slip through our fingers just because you’ve got a bit of a backstory? I mentioned that I interviewed you to Brian - he’s the head of biochem - and he nearly had an aneurysm. He teaches your papers in class. Don’t get people like you applying for community college positions every day, you know. ”

“Wow,” Ruben says, then laughs, slightly hysterically. “Holy crap - uh, sorry - oh my god. I’m just…thank you! Thank you so much. But, just to be clear, I did tell you that I’ve not been back to work since the, um, incident at my last job, because of the PTSD? So I might need a bit of an adjustment period?”

“Yes, yes, we’ll make it work,” Dan says firmly. “That’s why I’m calling you now, so that we can make the transition as low-stress as possible. When are you moving down to New York? I was thinking maybe if we start you off teaching summer school in July, it’s smaller classes and not a big workload, gives you some time to settle in.”

“Gives Brian some time to get me to autograph one of my papers for him.”

“I know you’re kidding but he’d genuinely probably cry,” Dan says, sounding thrilled at the possibility. “Don’t tell him I told you that. But definitely do it and take pictures.”

Ruben fumbles his way through talking safety precautions, psychological support, keeping off the radar and out of the public eye, but he’s barely paying attention to himself. He got a job. Shit, this blazer has definitely redeemed itself.

The second the call hangs up he undoes his top button, loosens his tie to the way he’s always preferred to wear it, and starts searching for cheap apartments in New York City.

***

It’s December and Ruben gets a sweater from his ma. Same as every year, either for Christmas or Dia de los Reyes or sometimes both: a predictable gift, maybe, but Ruben’s always been fine with not being surprised, and you can never have too much good quality comfort clothing.

It’s different to his normal style, though. Ruben usually wears crew necks, even before he had things that needed to be hidden by a high neckline. This one looks deceptively low with it’s more angled shape, but when he pulls it on it covers everything and the collar is oversized without being too restrictive like turtlenecks are, though there’s two buttons that means he can make it even less revealing if he needs to.

Not something he would’ve chosen for himself. Veers dangerously close to being distinctive. His mom says she thought maybe he’d like some variety, sounding a little bit worried the way she often does when she tries to expand Ruben’s horizons because it’s always 50-50 on how he’ll feel about it, but it fits properly, the fabric is soft and protective against the back of his neck, and it’s  _his_  shade of blue, closer to a personality trait than just a favorite color.

So few things feel like Ruben any more that he’ll cling onto whatever sense of home he can find in shades of royal and navy. The sweater is something different and something his both at the same time, and he hadn’t really considered that maybe he could have both at once.

“I like it,” he says.

***

It’s January and Ruben is quickly folding whatever clothes he grabs first to stuff into a suitcase, not wanting to think too hard about what he takes with him. His mom is pulling everything out again immediately so that she can very carefully fold it and replace it. He can’t see how her method yields any different results to what he’s doing other than slowing the process down, really, but it seems to be making her happy so he lets it slide.

Ma takes four different sweaters out and doesn’t refold them, laying them out side-by-side on the bed.

“It’s going to be cold tomorrow, cariño, and you have a long way to go,” she says. “Pick which one you want.”

Ruben hesitates.

“We can count down if you need to,” Ma says.

“No,” he says, picks the blue sweater with the buttons that he got for Christmas and drapes it over the back of the chair before he starts turning it into some kind of overblown philosophical dilemma. He’s made the decision to pack up and move states away and start a brand new career, he can do these things too. “I’ll wear this one.”

It’s hard to sleep that night. He doesn’t know if he’s made the right choice, about the sweater or about anything else that’s going to happen. Is it what the old Ruben would have done? Is it what the new Ruben should do?

He doesn’t know if it’s the right choice. But it feels like the necessary one. So he wears his new familiar-unfamiliar sweater while he says his goodbyes in the morning, he catches his bus feeling like himself and like someone completely different both at once, and he waits to see who Ruben Marcado might become under the New York City skyline.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [man it's hard to write happy fic about ruben at this stage. poor guy. anyway here's some vacations.]
> 
> [minor content warning for a few moments of ruben's emotionally abusive dad.]

School is the best thing that has ever happened to Ruben, even better than the aquarium or a birthday. He’d been scared about joining the big class once his fractured Spanglish improved enough, but even though he misses the quiet friendliness of the special educational needs room, mainstream isn’t as bad as he expected. The teachers praise his work. There’s a few mean comments from the other kids but not too many, no more than anyone else gets. Slow starter, fast runner: he’s already burning his trail through the elementary curriculum, with reports so outstanding that even Dad sometimes nods his head and says “that’s good”, and those rare moments of praise make Ruben feel like he’s flying, like he’s unstoppable.

The one thing Ruben doesn’t like about school is that it ends. The winding down of a semester fills him with the same dread that most other kids might feel about going back to class after a break. It isn’t that Ruben minds spending time baking with Mamá, or watching cartoons, or visiting Tío Rafael across town. What Ruben minds is… _vacation_. Ugh. They always go once or even twice a year, sometimes back to visit family in Vega Alta and sometimes unfamiliar places, never for long enough to feel settled in unfamiliar routines and still always far too long for his liking.

On vacation, there’s no grades to hide behind, nothing he can offer that will make Dad say _good_ or nod at him approvingly _._ Instead, Dad says _oh, I left Rubén’s plane ticket at home, guess he’ll have to wait in the airport till we get back_ , and then says it’s only a joke when he gets upset. Dad says it’s embarrassing when they go somewhere new just for Ruben to always eat fries instead of local food, and that they didn’t come all this way to sit in the hotel when Ruben doesn’t want to go outside _._ Dad waits until Mamá is taking a shower then digs his fingers into Ruben’s arms and says, “you’re ruining this for everyone, is that what you want?”

Ruben says nothing at all. Later, when his parents are in their room and he’s on the bed they made up for him on the pull-out couch, Ruben whispers _I hate you I hate you I hate you_ under his breath. Ruben goes where Mamá goes whenever he can, a shadow safely by her side, and thinks longingly of school.

***

One morning in February when Ruben is seven, Dad leaves without saying goodbye. They don’t talk about it.

Two days later the plane tickets they’d already booked for their trip to Puerto Rico arrive in the mail. Instead of throwing them out, Mamá puts them in the cabinet with her address book and the bills. They were supposed to be going to Tía Teresa’s, and Ruben knows from listening in on Mamá’s phone conversations that Dad is living with Teresa for now, so does that mean they’re going to see him when they’re there?

It’s Ruben’s fault that his parents aren’t together any more, he knows that. He heard them fighting about him the night before it happened. Maybe if they go to Tía Teresa’s and Ruben is good and acts normal the whole time and tells them how he did really well at school this semester then that will fix things, and Dad will come back. That’s what Ruben should want, right? That’s how families are meant to be.

They don’t talk about it, though, so he doesn’t ask, just waits and wonders and worries. Towards the end of June as departure day creeps unsettlingly close, he waits till Mamá is in the kitchen then goes to the cabinet, and slips the envelope with the tickets into the back of Mamá’s address book. The next time she’s looking in there for a phone number, the envelope falls out.

“Ay, madre, I need to cancel the flights,” she says to herself, and Ruben sighs with relief.

***

Life becomes very different in just a few short months. There’s so many things Ruben didn’t consciously realise he wasn’t allowed to do until suddenly he can: he can spread his books out over the living room floor and read for as long as he wants without getting in anyone’s way. He can play with his bedroom door open and not worry about making noise. He can climb into bed with Mamá after a bad dream instead of sitting in the dark by himself. 

Right now, Ruben is sitting on the floor of what was until recently Dad’s study, drawing pictures of sunflowers in a spiral-bound notebook with his back leaning against the desk where Mamá is going through some letters from her lawyer. He never used to be allowed in the study, but Mamá doesn’t mind as long as he’s quiet.

After a while, she throws down her pen, pushes her chair out and says, “I think we’ve earned a break, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Ruben says, and then, because Mamá had done it, throws down his own yellow marker dramatically before following her to the living room to see what she’s got in mind.

Mamá pulls out the stack of travel catalogues they keep under the coffee table. Oh. She’s talking about vacation. He thought maybe he could get away from that this year, but they sit on the couch together, thumbing through pages on glossy pages of sunny beaches and pretty hotels. Mamá keeps pointing at different pictures asking “here? here?”. With minimal interest, Ruben reads about family-friendly resorts all across the Caribbean, with water parks and ziplines and all kinds of things that he probably should be excited about but isn’t, until —

“Crocodiles!” he says, pointing. “Look, it says, you can do a river safari and they let you hold baby crocodiles.”

Mamá raises her eyebrows and says, “do you _want_ to hold a baby crocodile?”

What kind of question is that? Who _wouldn’t_? “Uh-huh!”

They look at a few other places, but he’s got his heart set on crocodiles now, and so they fly out from Philadelphia International Airport at the start of August. 

It isn’t like any vacation he’s ever had before. They share a twin room together and it doesn’t feel as frightening to be sleeping somewhere new when Mamá is with him. Every morning they sit out on their little balcony listening to the sound of the street musicians’ rhythms that carry through the air while Ruben eats his current favourite breakfast: a plain waffle, nibbled slowly and meticulously square by square. Mamá drinks her black coffee and doesn’t tell him he’s embarrassing her. They take a drive out to the river safari tour, where Ruben holds a baby crocodile just like the catalogue promised and tells Mamá how even though they look like it reptiles aren’t as closely related to dinosaurs as birds are. They go to a different nature reserve to feed the birds of paradise, and Ruben tells Mamá the thing about the dinosaurs a second time as she nods patiently.

At the beach he scrunches his toes in the wet sand by the shoreline, his skin burnt deep brown and itching with a seasalt that reminds him of Puerto Rico. Mamá stands next to him, holding his hand, her long skirt tied up so that it doesn’t get wet. She shields her eyes with her other hand and smiles out at the horizon, and Ruben has the sudden epiphany that _this_ how their family is meant to be, how it was always meant to be. Safe, and warm, and so far away from anyone yelling at him. They’re a little tireder than before, a little sadder for experience, a little smaller without Dad there, but they never needed him. The two of them have everything they need, right here in Montego Bay, Jamaica.

***

They have everything they need, or so Ruben thinks. It’s a shock, then, when about six months later Mamá comes to pick him up from Tío Rafael’s house after she’s been at dinner with a work friend - _again_ \- and this time the work friend comes in with her. A  man, tall but hunched over as if to minimize it, with brown curls and a brown tie and brown shoes. He shakes hands with Tío Raf. Mamá is wearing pink lipstick and a strange, flickery smile and she says “Rubén, I wanted you to meet Juan.”

Ruben says, “why?” 

“Because…he’s my—well, because we’re dating.”

Ruben looks at Juan, who waves awkwardly, and then looks at Mamá and says, “ _why_?”

Mamá tuts at him, but now Tío Raf has started asking how the two of them met so Ruben never gets a proper answer.

He hopes it won’t last, but he’s hoping in vain. Juan comes round for dinner. Juan sits with Mamá on the couch watching movies in the evenings. Juan is there at breakfast time and weekends. Ruben avoids him as much as possible, taking his books back into his bedroom and closing his door and wearing his ear defenders too to block out their conversation because whenever he hears that rumbly voice just too quiet for him to pick out the words, he feels absolutely certain that they’re talking about him, and he feels absolutely certain that it’s nothing good.

Mamá comes to his room one night saying she wants to tell him something, and he thinks, _this is it,_ but all she tells him is that this easter break they’ll be going to Puerto Rico to stay in Juan’s summer house in Dorado, and isn’t that exciting?

Ruben says nothing.

The vacation to Dorado isn’t anything like Montego Bay. Juan and Mamá share the main bedroom so Ruben is sleeping in the small guest bedroom by himself. Juan holds hands with Mamá walking along the beach while Ruben sulkily scuffles his feet through the sand trailing along behind them, thinking about picking a destination out of the travel catalogue together last year, and how Mamá didn’t even ask if he wanted to come here before they decided. 

Juan, for his part, takes Ruben’s scowling and silence with a sort of faintly baffled ambivalence, but Ruben isn’t fooled. Dad was always so much nicer to him when Mamá was around, too.

On the third day, Mamá tells him that they’re all going to drive to Vega Alta to visit Abuela, and it’s the final straw. Juan’s already taken over their house in Philadelphia and their vacation and all his mamá’s time. Vega Alta is where Ruben was born and the birthplace of all his complicated childish nostalgia of a life he was too young to really remember. He doesn’t want what little he has kept hold of torn apart by this new man in his Abuela’s house where Ruben took his first steps and ate his first piragua and his baby pictures are up on the wall.

“I don’t wanna go if _he’s_ coming,” he says, before he can think better of it.

Mamá looks scandalised. “Rubén Manuel, mind your manners! You apologise right now.”

Ruben folds his arms and stands his ground, pouting. It’s the truth. Besides, if he can just get her to spend this _one_ day with him like they did in Jamaica she’ll remember that things are so much better when its just the two of them. Then they can go back to the normal that he’d only just started to get used to before Juan came along and messed it all up.

“Ruben, you will apologise, or you’ll go to your room and stay up there until you’re ready to be polite.”

“Well, I guess I’ll stay up there for _ever_ then,” Ruben snaps, and slams as many doors as he can along the way to his room. He can hear conversation downstairs but before he can make the decision to listen in or not Mamá comes up the stairs to his room.

“I’m still going to your Abuela’s,” she says. “I haven’t seen her in months and she’s expecting us. Juan says if you really don’t want to go he’ll stay here and keep an eye on you.”

“What? _No_!” That’s the opposite of Ruben’s plan! “Why can’t he just stay here and I go with you?”

“Because I say so. Cariño, I’ve been trying to make this as easy as I can for you but that doesn’t mean you can walk all over us. You haven’t even given him a chance. He’s a good man.”

“Did you think that about Dad as well?” Ruben challenges.

Mamá gives him a hurt, disappointed look and says, “I’ll be back by this afternoon. If you need anything you can ask Juan, he’s in the living room. And for god’s sake, behave yourself.” She tries to lean in to kiss him, but he ducks away from it. “Well. Okay then.”

Around the sound of his heart thundering in his ears, Ruben hears her go downstairs, and a few moments later the front door closing. He didn’t think she’d call his bluff.

Why did he have to say anything? Since Dad walked out Ruben tries to be extra well-behaved, but sometimes he just can’t help himself. Now Ruben doesn’t even get to see Vega Alta or Abuela, and Mamá’s left him here alone with Juan, who must…oh, who must be _so_ mad at him. He scoots far back on the bed till his back’s against the wall, warily watching the door, but Juan doesn’t come up, even after a whole hour.

After a whole hour, though, Ruben’s also starting to get very thirsty. Carefully opening his door, the sound of the TV in the living room downstairs is a welcome cover. He can easily tiptoe to the kitchen without being heard. The glasses are in the top cupboard, which is easy enough to climb on the counter to reach, but as he’s jumping back down the glass slips out of his hand and smashes on the floor. The television turns off in the other room.

“Rubén?”

Oh no. Oh _no._ Ruben crouches, hurriedly trying to pick up al the bigger shards of glass in the wild hope that he can hide the worst of the mess but Juan’s already in the room and barking out “ _Rubén!”,_ louder and sharper than his low, deep voice has ever talked before.

Ruben drops the pieces he was holding. “I’m cleaning it up,” he babbles as Juan strides over to him. “It was an accident I got it I’ll fix it —“

But all Juan does is lift Ruben right up out of the semicircle of shattered fragments that are shimmering around his bare feet, and carries him over to put down at a safe distance by the kitchen door. He holds Ruben’s shoulders, but only lightly, and says, “you don’t pick up broken glass with your hands. You didn’t get cut, did you?”

Ruben shakes his head, then bursts into tears.

“Oh…come on now, that isn’t necessary.” Juan sounds nervous. “I don't know what...should I call your mom?”

“No!”There’s loud glass-smash noises still in Ruben’s ears and he made a mess and he made Mamá leave. He’s ruined everything again, and if she finds out he’s been bad while she was gone then she might be even more upset with him, she might never come home at all. “Please don’t tell!”

“I--fine.” Juan pinches the bridge of his nose. “Okay. How about you just go calm down in your room while I clear this up and then we’ll talk after.”

Upstairs, hiding under his bedsheets, Ruben berates himself for being so clumsy. He’s still thirsty, too, even more so after crying, but he wouldn't dare go try to get a drink a second time now.

When Juan comes up the first thing he says is, “I brought you some water” like he heard Ruben’s thoughts. Ruben peeks out at him, confused, but he really doesn’t seem like he’s going to shout. “Are you feeling better?”

“Mmhm,” Ruben sniffles, despite all evidence to the opposite.

“Don’t worry about the glass. Accidents happen.”

“Nnn.”

Juan comes over and puts the cup of water down on the table. He looks like he’s about to say something else but then just makes a clumsy arm-swinging gesture and says, “I guess I’ll leave you to it. Come down and watch TV if you want to,” then he leaves.

Ruben does not want to. He emerges for just long enough to drink his water then goes back under the sheet and ends up taking a long nap while he’s there. But later, when Mamá is back (she _did_ come back) Ruben does come down, and sits on the floor beside her to watch TV. Nobody says anything about what he did earlier.

“Your abuela missed you today,” Mamá tells him. “We could see her at the weekend, if you’ve changed your mind.”

“I’d like to see her,” he says, and then tentatively adds, “Juan can come too.”

***

Juan isn’t that bad. He’s definitely boring, and he doesn’t even know anything about chemistry, but he isn’t _bad_ , even after he moves in with them. Mostly the two of them just mind their own business and keep out of each other’s way, but now Ruben will say hello and give a proper answer when Juan asks about his day, and he’s even ringbearer at their somewhat unexpected wedding, and only makes faces a _little_ bit when the priest says “you may now kiss the bride”.

He doesn’t get to go with them on their honeymoon to Italy, which honestly he’s fine with because Italy’s really far away. Two weeks is a long time apart but he doesn’t mind staying at Tío Raf’s place and Mamá always comes back when she says she will. He’s ten years old now, he doesn’t need her around _all_ the time.

Mamá is less relaxed about the upcoming separation. She repacks Ruben’s suitcase three times and then says, for the millionth time, “maybe we shouldn’t go at all. I don’t want to leave him for that long.”

Ruben and Juan share a look of despair.

“Our deposit’s non-refundable, Stef,” Juan says. “Rubén’s a good kid, he’ll be fine. And this might be the last vacation we get for a long time.”

Mamá smiles and says, “I suppose that’s true.”

Ruben frowns. “Why?”

“Oh, um,” Juan stutters. “We weren’t really going to say until we got back…”

“We’ve already told my brother, he might as well know too,” Mamá says. She puts her hand on her belly, her face glowing. “Rubén, I’m having a baby. You’re going to be a big brother.”

“Oh,” Ruben says. “Huh.”

And that's all they say about it before he’s dropped off to stay at Tío Raf’s. Sitting at their table with a plate of cookies, Ruben’s making notes about the high school chemistry book his teacher lent him when cousin Raul peeks his head over the top of the table.

Raul takes a cookie in one pen-smudged hand and shoves it in his mouth, saying, “my mom says your mom is having a baby!”

Ruben confirms this to be true.

“Raul, your _hands!_ ” Tía Sara exclaims, dragging him over to the sink to wash the ink off while Raul asks Ruben a million more questions around his mouthful of cookie - “is it a boy or a girl? How come your mom isn’t fat? Is that why they left you here, to make room for the new baby?”

“Raulito!” Sara scolds. “Of course not. Rubén’s just staying while Tía Stef is on vacation. Be nice.”

“I was only ask— _ow,_ Mom, let go! I can wash my own hands.”

“Ha! I’ll believe that when I see it.” Sara keeps scrubbing at Raul’s hands, ignoring his squirming. “So, Rubén! Are you excited to have a little brother or sister?”

There hasn’t been much time to think about it. Now that Raul’s said it, Ruben’s worried that maybe he has a point: have they left him here so they can go off and make plans about the baby without him getting in the way? What if his little brother or sister loves new places and doesn’t have meltdowns and is way more fun than he is? They might just leave him behind _every_ time, and even though he doesn’t like vacation, he doesn’t want to be the only one left out either. Ruben knows he isn’t what Mamá signed up for with a kid. What if the new baby is?

“No,” he says. “I’m not excited.”

***

If travelling was stressful before then that’s nothing compared to travelling with a baby in tow. Paola wails all through the cab ride to the airport and through check-in and putting their luggage on the conveyor until both the grownups look like they’re about to lose their minds. Ruben offers Ma his ear defenders to borrow for a while and she almost accepts them, which means she really must be frazzled. Then they’ve just sat down in the lounge and Juan’s gone to get coffee when Paola, who has proven in her short lifetime to be an exceptionally vomit-prone infant, throws up all over herself and Ma. 

“Oh, _Paola_ ,” Ma sighs, looking like she’s about to cry. Ruben silently congratulates himself on not being the first one to cause trouble on this vacation. “Rubén, can you stay with the bags while I go get us cleaned up?

“Yes, Ma.”

“That’s my good boy,” she says, putting her purse in his lap. “Be very careful with this, it’s got all our passports in it, don’t talk to strangers.” She grabs Paola’s diaper bag and rushes off to find a bathroom.

Ruben clutches protectively onto the purse and swings his feet and reads the fine print on their plane tickets to pass time. He takes out his own recently-renewed passport to touch the gold emblazoned logo on the front. This one has his new name inside, truncated from the double-barrelled like the Chavez half of him never existed, which is exactly Ruben wanted. Calls from his grandparents had tapered off from infrequent to never, his grown-up cousins showed no interest. There was never even an attempt from his dad to send a birthday card or to check in on him. Why hang on to them? They didn’t hang on to him. 

Ma had asked, as they were doing the paperwork, if he wanted to change his last name to be the same as her and Juan and baby Paola.

“Juan isn’t my dad,” Ruben had said.

“He doesn’t mind,” Ma said. But Ruben didn’t want to be given a name out of pity. Juan is here for Ma, and for Paola, and even though him and Ruben get on fine, Ruben knows that it’s really out of necessity. He’s as much baggage as the cases he’s sitting with. Very very privately, he also thinks that it will only make things difficult later on if Juan doesn’t stick around. If he never takes the name, the name can’t be taken away.

When Ma comes back and finds Juan there with coffee, she looks like she might cry again, but this time with relief, and hands the baby over for Ruben to hold while she drinks it.

Paola, to Ruben’s delight, stops grumbling as soon as he’s holding her, as she very often does. Even though she’s noisy and sicks up all the time, Ruben does love her. He’s never been a big brother before but he’s trying really hard to be good at it: he learned how to feed her properly, and even how to change diapers, and he crawls around on the floor when she’s having tummy time so that she’ll figure out how to do it by herself when she’s ready. When they’re on vacation he’s gonna teach her how to pat sandcastles into place and push shells into the side so it looks pretty and how to scrunch your toes when the waves go out so that your feet sink under the sand, except he’ll need Mamá’s help with that because Paola can’t stand up by herself yet.

Being a brother is great, and he loves that Mamá always calls him an angel for looking after Paola so well and that Juan calls him a baby-whisperer, although he did have to clarify the first time that no, it was not an insult about Ruben’s occasional speech problems. But he can’t stop thinking about how in the bag by his side, there’s four passports, and amidst the three Rivera-Marcados, he’s the only one who is just a Marcado. The hanging hyphenate where something more once was, or where something should have been, the unfinished space that Ruben can’t fill. 

***

The last vacation Ruben goes on as a high school student is to his Abuela’s place in Vega Alta. Age fifteen, college bound in fall on a full scholarship. Mamá calls the trip a celebration, but if it’s a celebration it’s a deeply bittersweet one: he’s pretty sure the reason they’re really here is a lot more to do with the fact that, a month after announcing their divorce, Juan found a place of his own last week and moved all of his things out. So far this has been low on vacation fun, heavy on Mamá and Abuela having quiet talks in Spanish together with a lot of tear-stained tissues and empty coffee mugs. Paola has been moping around listlessly. Ruben’s trying to do his pre-college reading but he’s not getting far with it, distracted by the sombre mood in the house, distracted by the weight of expectation that he doesn’t know how to live up to every time he thinks about the year ahead of him.

The only one with any energy is Mercedes, who at thirteen months old does not have any concept of how difficult and exhausting life is. What she does have a concept of is attention, and specifically that she is not receiving enough of it. “Mamámaaaaaa,” she’s squeaking in a shrill little voice from the floor. “Mamá! Mamá! Maaaa—”

“Not right now, Mercy,” Mamá says absently.

Mercedes makes a grinding whining noise that makes Ruben cringe instinctively and close his book. He could use a break anyway. From the way Mamá’s rubbing her own temples, so could she.

“I can take the girls for a walk if you want,” he offers, picking Mercedes up. She hollers “Roo!” in his ear and tugs on his hair.

Mamá hmms uncertainly. “I dont know if that’s a good idea…”

“We won’t go far", he reassures her. “Just to the store. I’ll be careful.”

“Esterán bien, Steffi,” Abuela says. “When I was their age we’d be out in the street todo el dia and nobody made a fuss, it’s perfectly safe. And we could go next door and see Ana, she’s been asking after you, you know.”

“You’ll be okay with the girls, cariño?

“Sure. Come on, Paolita, we’ll go get ice-cream.”

Mercedes happily coos “Roo, Roo, Roo” from her stroller all the way down the street. Paola holds tightly onto the handle of the stroller and sucks the thumb of her other hand until just outside the store she stops dead and says “Ruben.” 

“That’s me.”

“Mamá and Daddy are getting a divorce.”

“Yes.”

She presses her fingers against the stroller so they all bend back as far as they’ll go and mournfully says, “we’re never gonna see Daddy again.”

“What? Of course you are,” Ruben says. “Where did you get that idea?”

“You don’t ever see _your_ daddy.”

Ruben winces. “That’s…different. Your dad loves you a lot. He picked a house near ours just so he can see you as often as possible, remember?”

Her eyes well up anyway, and she says, “but I don’t _want_ them to break up.”

Poor kid. Ruben kneels down to hug her. “What if we call him when we get back to Abuela’s, would that make you feel better?” Paola nods, tears spilling. Ruben wipes her cheek with his sleeve. “We’ll do that then. Ice-cream first, though.”

They walk back slowly, sitting on Abuela’ porch step while they finish their ice-creams and a chocolate-smudged Mercedes dozes off in her stroller. When they get back inside, Ruben dials Juan’s number off the grey corded landline in Abuela’s hallway, twisting the cable round his finger. He’s known Juan for seven years. They lived together, Juan’s driven him to school and lent him money for lunch, Ruben’s helped him reupholster chairs and build bookshelves and paint walls. But he was never Ruben’s father. It’s not like Ruben’s going to be going round for weekend visitation, not like Juan has any investment in Ruben’s future, so where do they stand with each other now? 

“Juan Rivera.”

“Hey, it’s Ruben.”

“Ruben? Is everything okay?”

“Yeah, Paola’s here. She’s feeling sad and wanted to talk to you.”

“Oh, I see. How’s the vacation going? How’s your mom?”

“Fine,” Ruben says. “I’ll pass you over.”

Paola takes the phone and clutches it tightly to her ear, all tearful again. “Daddy, I _miss_ you.”

With a sudden ache in his stomach, Ruben leaves them talking on the phone and takes Mercedes out of her stroller, carrying her through to Mamá’s room. He wipes off the worst of the chocolate then tucks her into the old travel crib that Abuela had set up for her, the same one that Paola and long before that Ruben used to sleep in when they stayed over, feeling old beyond his years and very much alone, teetering on the precipice of a too-young adulthood.

It's the last vacation before college. Though he doesn’t know it yet, it's the last vacation he'll take with his family at all.

***

In the January of the final year of Ruben’s PhD, Tía Teresa calls to tell him his Abuelo Chavez has passed away. “The funeral’s on the eighteenth,” she says.

“Are you going?”

“I kind of have to. He was my dad, after all. Are you?”

“Wasn’t invited.”

“I’m inviting you,” Teresa points out.

Ruben clicks the end of his pen against his temple a few times. “Will _he_ be there?

“Who knows where he’ll be,” Teresa says dismissively. “You don’t have to speak to him even if he is. Don’t let him drive you away from the rest of the family.”

It’s years too late for that. Ruben gave them all up along with their name. Teresa’s the only one who’s ever made the effort to keep in touch. He thinks thats because she knows what it’s like to be a disappointment. Things were never the same between her and her parents after she moved in with her girlfriend. It’s a familiar kind of fear, the same one that’s been keeping Ruben closeted from his family for the better part of five years since he first recognised that side of himself. Part of him thinks Mamá would love him no matter what. Part of him wonders if Teresa thought the same thing about her mom and dad.

What would Abuelo and Abuelita Chavez have thought about Ruben if they knew him now? Would they be proud that he’s close to a PhD at an age where most people haven’t even finished their first degree? Would they be proud of who he is? Or would he just be Ruben, autistic and fatherless and queer and lonely, this generation’s unwanted child.

“I don’t have time to take a trip right now anyway,” he says, and feels no guilt about it. He’s pretty sure none of them would come to his funeral, if it was the other way around.

***

He keeps an image of Montego Bay as his desktop background on his work laptop, some nineteen years after the fact. There were other vacations since that one, but none of them quite the same. None of them with that moment,sandwiched between the anxiety of early childhood and the pressure of adolescence, of absolute certainty that Ruben was exactly who he was supposed to be. You could call it aspirational, he supposes. One day he'll be that content again.

Right now you could also call it a good distraction: he’s tracing an outline around the edge of the words with the cursor while on the phone to Ma, who is not taking kindly to the news that once again he’s missing out on the family vacation.

“They can’t find anyone else to take over just for one week? _One_ week, Ruben, it isn’t asking much!”

Ruben sighs. “Do you know how lucky I am to have this position? They took a huge chance with this promotion, by all rights I should still be a tech. I have to show them I’m taking it seriously.”

Ma scoffs. “You’ve been there for two years, if they don’t know that you are taking it seriously by now then I don’t know what will prove it, and seven days in the Dominican Republic is not going to change that.”

“Ma—“

“You haven’t come on vacation with us since you were a teenager, you cancelled dinner _again_ last week, we didn’t see you on your birthday. Anyone looking at our family photos would think I don’t even have a son! And do you know, sometimes it feels like they’d be right.”

Ruben recoils like she just punched him in the stomach. “What does _that_ mean?

“It means that your family misses you, cariño,” she says. “I feel like I hardly know you any more. When will you just slow down? When will you take a break?”

He moves his cursor over the palm tree and follows the shape of its leafy fronds, hands shaky now. It isn’t like he wants to be a stranger to them. It isn’t like spending a week in the sun sounds _bad._ But she’s never really understood why he can’t let himself have that, not yet. She’s never understood what he has to prove first.

“When I’ve earned it,” he says.

***

In the middle of frantically throwing whatever clothes he can grab into the red suitcase sitting open on his bed, the last few weeks hit Ruben like he’s been hamstringed, his legs giving out from under him. He presses his face against his bedsheets, trembling.  How did he let things get to this point? He’s been shot at, strangled, suspended from work, almost certainly going to be fired. Everything he worked on for the kill drug and Blackout needs to be deleted, five years of work down the drain. Now he’s skipping town with a murderer on his tail. He just wanted to prove that he was good enough. All he did was ruin his life.

No time for this. Pick a destination, delete the files, run like hell, cry about it later. But where can he go? He can’t stay with Mamá, that’s the first place Ian will go looking - god, he needs to tell her to hide out with Tío Rafael for a while - and Juan’s too close, even Raul in New York doesn’t feel like enough distance.

_Puerto Rico_ , he thinks, pulling out his phone and quickly typing in a search for last-minute plane tickets. Tía Teresa won't mind him showing up on her doorstep unexpectedly and hiding out for a while until he figures out his next move. Like father, like son, but it’s not like Ruben has many other options, and there’s two more flights out to San Juan tonight that he could make.

Still, his fingers hesitate over the _buy now_ button, frozen, precious seconds wasting. He thinks about how hard he tried, how even if it failed he can’t deny that he gave everything he could to this nightmare project. He thinks about being able to just rest for once. Feet in the sand, sun on the horizon. Nothing to prove, no expectation to fall short of. God, hasn’t he earned a break?

He scrolls up to the search bar and changes the destination from San Juan to Montego Bay.

Not long later, when he stops by the hospital, Josh asks where he’s going.

“Somewhere warm and safe,” Ruben says, and even after all he’s been through, for the next three hours, he genuinely believes that might be true.


End file.
